If he's here, who's running hell?

YouTube - Tasty Burger! Books have been written on Pulp Fiction. Many a podcast has been spoken. Quentin Tarantino is still kind of working on his craft here in 1994. Even if it's not your favorite QT film, and for me it depends on the day which is my favorite, it would be hard to argue it's anywhere near the bottom of his filmography. We have had 30+ years of digesting this mostly glorious piece of work. What's in the suitcase? The random scene order. You can see the way he works the burger in, quite unsettling, like the previous Hans Landa scene from #38.  Pulp has more rewatchable scenes than The Departed, but that didn't make it easy to pick one. I could have gone with the Wolf scene, which feels like a short film unto itself. YouTube - Winston Wolf I could have gone with the ending, which ends up being a Samuel Jackson monologue. "I hate to shatter your ego but this ain't the first time I've had a gun pointed at me" YouTube - Ending Diner Scene “T...

YouTube - Heavy Lies The Crown Second Jack Nicholson scene on the list and not the last. His character is the rewatchable part of this movie. It wouldn't be the same without him. We know what the movie looks like without him, it's called Infernal Affairs and was made four years prior. I also came into The Departed way too late in life. It's in my top 60 list of all time but could be higher. There is a good mystery in this story. Many similarities to Goodfellas. Leo turns in a great performance, most of the cast does exquiste, but any of them could be replaced except Jack and still keep the movie as powerful as it is. Granted Leo gets the most screen time, so when we are getting the two of them onscreen together, we are paying attention. The scene where the two meet is probably my number two scene. Youtube - Billy meets Frank The elevator scene isn't really rewatchable for me for obvious reasons. The cranberry juice scene is pretty good even though no Frank. YouTube - Cr...

YouTube - Bohemian Rhapsody I don't know if I ever heard Bohemian Rhapsody until my early 20s. Or at least it never grabbed me until then. But it did that one fateful night and it's been one of my favorites ever since. What Mike Myers does with this song is just a perfect introduction to Wayne and Garth. Mike Myers was in Bohemian Rhapsody being against the song. Myers said nobody will bang their heads to this song. Bohemian Rhapsody almost wasn't in the movie. The studio and producer Lorne Michaels wanted something more current, with Guns N' Roses being considered for the scene. Myers fought hard for Queen because he had grown up listening to the song with his brother and friends. He knew exactly how ridiculous and perfect it would be. He was so determined to keep it that he reportedly threatened to quit if they replaced it. Myers wasn't just making it up, either. He had actually spent his teenage years driving around with friends singing along to it. So that scen...

YouTube - Qui-Gon & Obi-Wan vs Darth Maul So much went wrong with the prequel trilogy. From Jar Jar to I don't like sand to From my point of view the Jedi are evil. Way too much nonsense. Midichlorians? What the hell? Darth Vader made C-3P0. So landing on the Millenium Falcon were his son, his mentor, his main driod that he never acknowledges again or the one he created that he never acknowledges again. And they are coming to rescue his daughter. The finale for The Phantom Menace is quite like The Return of the Jedi. There is a space battle, a ground battle and a lightsaber fight. They are pretty big time fillers but are ultimately just big action set pieces that add little to the overall story but put a ribbon on everything. Here you have one character we know nothing about, has one line, shows up, looks wicked, kills our main character. But it sounds and looks awesome when it happens. It's well choreographed. Good on Disney for not killing him off but bringing him back i...

YouTube - ChatGPT goes Sentient This is a chilling introduction to Ultron, and honestly, it feels like a pretty good approximation of what I imagine the birth of digital intelligence, agentic AI, and physical robotics might look like. You create something with incredible knowledge and capability, give it the ability to think and act on its own, and then suddenly realize it doesn't necessarily share your goals. The fact that Ultron wakes up, immediately starts absorbing information, takes down Jarvis and quickly decides that humanity is the problem makes the whole sequence surprisingly unsettling. I absolutely love James Spader's voice for the character. It's not the typical deep, robotic villain voice. Spader can make Ultron sound calm, intelligent, sarcastic, and almost charming one second, then completely unhinged the next. That was very intentional on Joss Whedon's part. Whedon said Spader was his first and only choice because he wanted someone who could have that hy...

YouTube - Final Duel Now here is one where I knew exactly what scene was going to make the list. Nothing even came close in my mind when it came to sheer re-watchability: the final duel in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . The movie clocks in at about three hours, which is no small commitment when you want to sit down and watch the whole thing. Payback is roughly half as long, and I still re-watch that entire movie all the time. But with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , I can jump straight to the final showdown and be completely satisfied. While this isn't my favorite Western, it's pretty incredible that a 1966 movie can still feel this impressive almost 60 years later. I also haven't watched the other two movies in the trilogy yet, so I'm going into this one without much comparison. I like it more than Unforgiven , although I see a similarity between the two: most of the movie sits at a pretty solid level, but then the ending takes everything up several notches. And wh...